Firstly someone could genuinely (off the record in some supernatural form) be very very old indeed but the main issue I have is that even though it's easily possible to make any positive number up to the age-of-14, year, available for selection they only allow people 100 or under to use DDO as beginner but this is DEFINITELY rude to anyone who begins using it at 101+.

you cannot refute this by saying 'no one over 100 years uses the Internet' because that is an invalid assumption that is unfalsifiable and also unproveable.

Since this is a 5 round debate, I will use this round as an acceptance and outlining round.

Since this is a debate on a change of DDO, the BOP falls on the one suggesting the change. Also, given that any change will take time and effort of Juggle away from other potential changes, should the debate arguments result in a completely agnostic and neutral position, voters should vote CON.

I will assume that this debate is being done in good faith and integrity and that all words are held to their common meaning in such context as the resolution.

So my opponent's only point is that people over 100 years old may use the site.

This is easily addressed. First, the birth year does not matter and does not have any impact on whether someone can use the site or not. If a 104 year old wants to use DDO, they will not be stopped by this limit. Of course, should this really be an issue on purely ethical grounds, then there is no reason to go all the way back to year 0. The oldest living human is 115, born 1897 [1], so there is no reason to go any further.

Now, Pro did account for this in their opening round, by suggesting that there may be some very very very old people that we simply don't know about. However, this does not in any way support going to year 0. The likelihood of someone being born in the year 114 AD still being alive is the same as the likelihood of someone being born in the year 114 BC still being alive. There is no reason to hate on one and not the other. So changing the year to 0 does not solve the problem, only changes the arbitrary year that the problem focuses around.

I will respond to this with two different issues that both need to be addressed.

1) The scripting is actually not very difficult at all. There are a number of ways to do this, you could have "AD" and "BC" be a simple switch that can be triggered to one or the other. Based on the switch, the math is extremely easy to put it. The coding for this is actually not very difficult, as there are already many switches that our profiles use, one more is not a big deal. Another way would be to get rid of "year" altogether and simple allow the user to type in their age and then have their birthday date be the day that the age is given a +1. That as well is not too hard.

2) This does not address the issue. Whether the limit is at year 0 or 1912, some people are being excluded in proper representation. So if some people are being excluded, it is better to exclude for no additional effort, rather than exclude for some additional effort.

1) Just because people may or may not be familiar with their exact date of birth (which you cannot really make this argument if you are going to assume humans that can live for unknown lengths of time) does not mean that it is okay to discriminate against them. No more so than you could say that because blacks are less intelligent, they don't need to be allowed into school.

2) Pro has provided no reason to believe that his method would have a lower error. Since we are assuming (due to Pro's R1) that people can live for any indefinite length of time, we cannot say that a cutoff of 100 years will have an error of X and that a cutoff of 2013 years will have an error of Y without knowing at least vague stats about these undocumented age-defying demigods. While there are people that do live to over 100, I go back to what I said in R2 that there is no reason to set the date back past 1897 (the birth year of the oldest known living human). Once they are included to that year, there is no logical data for anything past that, it is all fairy tale.

To reiterate, there is no reason to arbitrarily select the year 0. As said in my R2, the birth year on DDO does not limit whether you can participate or not. As said in R2 (and re-said in this round), there are no known humans that were born before 1897, and so little reason to go beyond that. Since Pro wants to assume the existence of demigods, there is no reason to stop at year 0 and exclude any demigods that were born before then. This proposal by my opponent does not solve any problem and only changes where the supposed "discrimination" occurs.